Is the Labour Party in Britain the Conservative party?

Question

If so , what is the liberal party called? Is there two main parties like in the US? Or do you have more?
Will one of my British friends please clear it up? Thanx!

Answer 1

Roughly speaking- The conservative party in the UK is the equivalent of the Republicans in the US, and The labour party is the Equivalent of the Democrats.

Answer 2

No the Labour party are *supposed* to be the socialists. A rough comparision would be your Democrats.

The Conservative party is called . . . The Conservative Party. Known as Tories for short. Roughly equivalent to your Republicans

The big two are The Tories and Labour. The Liberal Party are a third, lesser party. We have a whole host of other, lesser parties (BNP, Socialist Workers etc) that occasionally gain seats in Parliament but will never get into power.

In policy though we in the UK don't have any party that is as right wing as the Republicans. If you compared policies, the Democrats would be more like the UK's Conservative Party and the Republicans wouldn't have an equivalent in UK politics (unless you counted right wing nutters like the BNP - British Nationalist Party)!

Answer 3

The conservative party is the most (mainstream) conservative party - though they are probably more liberal and inclined to socialism than most US democrats.

The labour party are left wing; they support moderately high gradiated taxes (i.e. rich pay more), and were the first party in the 20th century to introduce real socialism to the UK. There is no real equivolant between them and a US political party. They aren't necesarily very liberal though.

The liberal democrats are a moderate left wing, but mostly liberal party. This party makes a stronger stand on issues such as the environment. They roughly correlate to what the whig party in the US was - they are the successors to the UK whig party.

VERY roughly speaking the conservative party (also known as the tory party) is the equivolant to the US republican party, and the Labour party are the equivolant to the democrats - but in reality UK conservatives would be shocked at the extremist conservatism of the republicans, and the labour party and the democrats would make uneasy bedfellows at best. Our two country's political parties don't have a lot in common.

Answer 4

No, the Labour party is traditionally the more pro-worker, progressive, liberal party. However under the leadership of Tony Blair, they decided to bend over and take it from Bush in 02-03 when it came to the Iraq war when they knew all of the intelligence said it was wrong. Their justification was that they knew if they pissed the USA off it would be bad for their economy. Kind of a stupid reason to go along with such a bloody conflict.
Were I British, though, which I'm not, but I know people who are, I would still stay with the Labour party though because they still *USUALLY* suit the interests of the working class better than the other parties.

Answer 5

Labour have been taking and implementing Conservative ideas for some time now - the latest being the idea for a Border Police force.

It is a bit of an admission that their underlying ideology is wrong but in Britain today hypocrisy abounds.

However their methods of implementation aren't the same - they don't seem to be able to implement a good idea properly.

Answer 6

the Conservative party is the opposition to the Labour party. Conservatives used to be conservative: right wing; capitalist; antiworker. Labour used to be liberal, leftist, socailist. Both parties are now essentailly economic pragmatists now with slight right (cons) and laft (labour) leanings. Nickname for conservs was Tory or tories and Whigs for Labour. There have been parties called the Liberal party from time to time. Also Social Democrats, Communists, etc. Various Silly parties have also registered and run protest candidates

Answer 7

I don't think even we know the difference anymore, they are so closely matched and have the same policies that i expect they cant even tell the difference. The liberal party is an outsider, which doesn't really have any practical policies, this is one of the reason they have no chance of getting elected, plus they wouldn't know what to do if by some miracle they got into power.

Answer 8

a rough comparison is labour as your democrat and conservative as republican.The liberal party are probably what you might call pinko leftie fa66ots All the main parties in the uk are more to the left of yours,be it in varying degrees.All this applies only to england and mostly wales.I can hear scots nationalists grinding their teeth already